Author of Horror / Speculative Fiction

Save the Pod!

I wanted to blog about this over the weekend, but . . . well, you know. I had other things on my mind. Anyway! I’m not the only who needs assistance right now. My favorite horror podcast, Pseudopod, needs our help. They rely on donations and subscriptions to pay for production costs, pay their narrators, and most importantly, pay the writers who provide the content. In fact, they currently pay writers $100 a story (which is awesome).

Unfortunately, Escape Artists (Pseudopod’s parent company) is in danger of closing at the end of the year. This means no more Pseudopod, no more great horror stories, and one less paying venue for small-time writers like myself. We can’t let this happen. I listen to Pseudopod religiously (even though they rejected my story way back in 2007 due to a bizarre coincidence*).

Feed the Pod! Donate!

Anyway, I don’t want to see a good thing die. If you’ve got a few bucks or can go without a fancy overprice coffee for a day, consider sending it their way. I pitched $10 into the hat because that’s all I can spare right now, but I hope to give more in the future. So, let’s keep Pseudopod alive and writhing–at least for a while. They haven’t published me yet.

TK

*I came this close to having my story TOOTHACHE accepted by Pseudopod back in ’07, but the rejected it because . . . well, read for yourself. Here’s an email from the editor, Ben Phillips:

Thank you for sending us “Toothache”. We were greatly entertained by the style and concept, and would likely have accepted it except for a bizarre coincidence: we just purchased a story called “Toothache” from an author named James Maddox, also about a small creature that climbs out of a painful cavity to torment the protagonist. I have absolutely no explanation for this bizarre turn of events, but I will say that I sincerely hope you’ll be encouraged to submit again. Sometimes this type of thing just happens.

I did submit again, but it was a story that wasn’t as good (nor was it really horror), and by that point I was caught up in writing TLM. Yeah. Such is life.

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One thought on “Save the Pod!”

Pseudopod seems to be hard-up for content, as what they’ve run for most of this and last year don’t even qualify as horror. More like suspense. Their current offering is an old Jack London story. I read it back in the 80’s as a preteen, nothing scary, or horrible about it. Man and dog starving in the wild, bond between man and stupid subservient creature is broken as instincts tell the dog to survive at all costs…and the dog’s rebellion is handled in a couple matter-of-fact sentences at the very end. All very tidy and mundane. The pod needs more monster, zombie, supernatural, and creature-from-beyond stories: actual horror/scary stuff…compared to what they were, I’m sorry to say, I wouldn’t miss The Pod if it died. Their best stuff was over half a decade ago. Maybe the problem is the stories that are being chosen. Different cultures have different ideas of horror, as is evidenced by Alister’s choosing to narrate the stories he considers “really horrific”…which are routinely boring suspense stories that culminate in mundane things like “was the man who warned the main character really there, or just a ghost?”. I’m betting some real horror gems are being passed over as being “too much”. That Toothache story (which was really good, btw) would more than likely be considered too gross to run on Pseudopod THESE days. PODCASTLE even ran a story that would have been better suited for Pseudopod a few months ago: a woman from a hunter/gatherer culture goes out to capture prey for her family and her hard-won mate…and returns to find they had been starving long enough to value *her* as food more than as mother and mate. Very violent and horrific end to her life at the hands of her new mate and daughter. THAT’S something that should have been on the Pod. Poor choices. I can’t post this on the pseudopod forums because people with very mundane taste in horror (most of the people there these days) would shout me down and give me all kinds of grief for what I perceive as a deterioration in taste of chosen stories. Sorry if this double-posts. My adblocker had a recent update and it’s causing problems in some areas.